Oh and D totally almost got bit by a rattlesnake

See, the thing is D and I have been working on all these things. A sitcom and a movie. We’ve been trying to keep it real, like, he’s always flying up from LA and we write all day long. We take lunch breaks and everything - like a real job. I have a real job. I’m a web development engineer. Mostly he flies up here to Oakland, but sometimes I fly down to LA and we write there. That’s what I did a few weeks ago.

Here’s the thing: He’s got this new girlfriend and a new place. I’d never been there before, but you know how it is when you, sort of, invade a friend’s world? It’s kind of amazing to see someone in a place you don’t usually see them or to see a good friend out of their element. I guess this was his element, but he looked like a fish out of water. He girlfriend is amazing, but it was funny watching him run around trying to make us both comfortable.

The thing with D is he’s this brilliant, good looking, charming guy right? He doesn’t really work. He dropped out of med school. He has a degree in physics or something, but what he really wants is to get paid to write. I do too. We’ll get paid to write soon enough, but I’m writing all this so you know how surprised I was when he picked me up at the airport and took me to his 3.5 million dollar mansion.

Fuck Yeah.

I guess he worked out some deal through a friend or his girlfriend’s friend where they could live in this mansion until it sells. His place was tight. It was all up in the hills of Topanga. There were rattlesnakes and coyotes and this wicked view. Miles of hills everywhere. We wrote twelve hours a day and once in a while it would hit us: If we wrote well enough this house could turn into our house. Not necessarily the house (i don’t want a big house), but it was like we were chipping away at a safe. Building towards our reward. On top of it.

His place was on this hill and you could see LA lighted in the valley at night. Nature and poison right there. Coyotes and hollywood. It was all right there and fuck if that didn’t motivate us.

On our last night we were driving up the dark windy road to his place and this owl flew past the windshield and perched (perched?) on the side of the road. Right next to us, like, ten feet away. I had never seen an owl that close up before and it was like it was posing for us. We stopped the car and just watched it for, maybe, five minutes. The thing had these huge eyes. It didn’t sweat us at all. It was, jesus I can’t believe i’m saying this, magical.

When it flew away we drove up the hill to D’s mansion and wrote our asses off.

**********************************************

Oh hey. J and I started a website. We write about video games. This is our site: www.yetihunt.com

$750 close to BART

It's an olive, beat-up, apartment complex. Totally looks like a hotel. Grey, weirdo neighbor, stands on the balcony laughing about it with me. We joke about painting a pool on the parking lot below. We're completists. Jewish immigrants down in the corner apartment on halloween with their kid. He's dressed up as a dragon. Says "raaaaaaaaawwwwwwwr" when I walk by. Cute as hell. It breaks your heart. Guy downstairs gets his kid once in a while. Must be some divorce. He wants a yard. He wants a garden. He's always trying to make the tiny space in front of his door into a garden. More plants than can fit. Watering all the time in his sandals. Cars try to edge by without breaking his pots, but they can't. He waters other people's plants. Wants to make this cheap hotel into something. We all do. Teenager downstairs is a trouble maker. His mom says so. He sneaks behind the complex to smoke pot with hot high school girls. His mom says he's always up to no good. N and I lurk into some indian place downtown and see this kid in the corner playing the most beautiful guitar ever. He's in some trance. Just playing his heart out. Do the hot high schools even know about that? Old black lady in number four is in some pyramid scheme. She's always giving me samples. Tubes of liquid that are supposed to revitalize your day and sketchy vitamins like you'd see on the counter of some liquor store. When she walks by i'm out smoking and I say "hey thanks those things did wonders for me" and she says "thanks sweetie". I've got a cabinet full of this stuff. Never touched it. Land Lady speaks in a thick accent. Her son always wanted to play music. He's got to come around and move the trashcans out to the street etc. I'm pretty sure his wife hit on me when he was out of town once and my kitchen sink was fucked up. He's got this little kid with curly blond hair. Looks like an Aryan angel poster child. Kid hangs out in my studio while his dad fixes things. I know one magic trick. It's some cheap disappearing coin thing and it always cracks the kid up. We all listen to NPR and joke around. It's this trashy olive apartment complex filled with starts and middles and ends. We share laundry detergent and sometimes say "hi" when we pass each other.

Mothers: Lock up your daughters. They’re stupid.

Last night, after experiencing for the first time in my life the human emotion they call "boredom", i decided to meet N and Crazy D at the stork club for some drinks.

Well, actually, we were supposed to meet some common friends of ours at this "art show/hip fuck/band/house party" thing on San Pablo, but then I remembered that I'd rather stick an ice pick into my eye while listening to led zeppelin then go to an "art show/hip fuck/band/house party" thing unless, of course, I knew for a fact that Mary Louise Parker was going to be there waiting for me with a can of gasoline, a lighter and two tickets to a secret Jawbreaker reunion show.

So Stork Club it was. This was my first time meeting Crazy D and let me tell you, as someone who tends to err on the side of "hate" on first impressions, I immediately liked the guy. Glasses, slight build, biology teacher by day, karate teacher by night and way too drunk to be out in public. He radiated that cross between manic energy and comforting warmth that I just love in people.

Shortly after ordering drinks a band took the stage. N and Crazy D disappeared into the crowd for a better view. I kind of slunked off to a corner by myself to watch the band in peace and got the fuck rocked out of me. Really. This band was the most amazing thing I'd seen in a long time. They were kind of an east bay TurboNegro. The singer worked the crowd with this vicious energy and was about the coolest, most good looking guy I have ever seen. Ever.

Seriously, I would have even remembered their name if they hadn't been such annoying pricks between songs. Got to work on that witty banter kids. You'll go places.

About two or three songs in N tapped me on the shoulder and said we had to get out of there. Behind her, looking dazed and swaying, was Crazy D. He looked like he wanted nothing more then to cuddle up, right there, on the stork club's filthy floor and crash out for a few days.

We hopped in her truck, threw his bike in the back and got the guy home. After saying goodbye to him and pushing him off in the general direction of his front door I asked N what happened.

"He kept saying people in the club wanted to start a fight with him so I thought we should get him out of there. Why would anyone want to start a fight that guy? He's so nice."

"The last thing he said to me before running into the crowd was 'I feel like breaking things and fucking shit up.'"

"Oh. Well that makes more sense then."

I got home around midnight, wrote this and went to sleep.

*****************************

Christmas Eve N and I bought a six pack and walked down to the bay. From the pier by my house The City is perfectly framed, dead center, and you can even see all three bridges. We played with her dog and listened to some guys near us pass an old acoustic guitar around and talk about music. We talked about christmas. We talked about christmas so much that we got christmas fever and decided to go christmas crazy.

We tore off down university in search of all things Yule. We found a christmas tree lot by my house and as soon as I walked in I knew exactly which tree I wanted.

"oh yeah... there's my bitch. Who's my mother fucking christmas tree? You are."

It was a tiny little tree, small enough for us to carry off, and only cost us $20. We got the tree to my studio and then split off, scavenger hunt style, to hunt for more christmasy goodness. N hit Andronico's for christmas food and some popcorn we could thread for the tree. I hit the dollar store for some decorations and lights and found plenty of both.

"God bless you dollar store. God bless you dollar store, everyone."

Back at my place we decorated the tree, listened to Bing Crosby, watched A Charlie Brown Christmas (see? my christmas cheer is so huge that it overrides the part of my brain that would, normally, mention that I had never noticed what a hard core christian message that cartoon ends with) and ate N's famous french onion soup.

Merry Christmas.

*****************************

The colder seasons are the time to make changes. Overcast days with firewood chimney smoke smells. The rain just explodes at your window and that's when you start making lists.

Time to hunker down and plot your escape. Camp down. Stay in. Read some books. Make decisions. Winter is when you're sun deprived and depressed enough to really dive deep and get things done.

You have to come out of the other side cold, well planned and ready to strike.

hand in unlovable hand

Friday my studio was completely demolished in a night filled with unexpected cuddlers, guitar playing geniuses and the good kind of drunken conversation. It could be that the amount of love, alcohol and awesomeness you pour into an evening is directly proportionate to the fucking disaster you wake up with.

B and I had spent the day slogging off work and fucking around with my new four track. The guy can rock the harmonica. I can sort of sing and he can't sing at all. Combine all this with my acoustic guitar skills and we sounded like a lama fucking a tornado. Record deal forthcoming.

When it got dark people started cramming into my tiny castle. I was planning on taking it easy and getting to bed early so i'd be bright and crisp for my reno trip the next day. I think we clocked out around four A.M.

When I woke up my floor (it's a really small place) was layered in an inch of potting soil (all my plants and their pots were destroyed in the chaos), poker chips, pennies, cigarette butts, guitar strings, pens, bills, poems, beer bottles, undefined liquids (beer? probably) and books (my bookshelf took a tumble... fucking ikea).

Joe Awesome was having a birthday party in Reno. Around noon B and I bought a six pack and hit the 80. We were running away from one disaster and speeding towards another. Reno, at least, is not my disaster. Somebody else fucked that town up a long time ago. I was in the perfect post-break-up-mood for a place like that. The city was constructed, solely, for beating dead horses. I certainly did. I cut off its hooves off and smashed its fucking head in.
********************************************************************

There is something so awesome about driving down an interstate highway with the windows rolled down - listening to some shitty cassette tape you found on the floor of the cab - that I can't even write about it.

The Reno trip was all about A's birthday. He rented some big time fancy suite with a full on bar and big screens everywhere. My job (dude if you're reading this I really am sorry. Who would have thought they would all actualy show up?) was to fill it with as many people A didn't know as possible. We flew D in from LA. One of B's girlfriends found out about the trip and drove in from Berkeley. N happened to be staying in Tahoe that night and joined us as well.

Notes:

- I paid $140 so a strange women would dry hump my knee for twenty minutes

- Ashtray rocked harder than Ashtray has ever rocked

- B is the best drunk driver ever. There should be some sort of compeition for this. He would win.

- I am a horrible gambler

shrimp cocktails and rum in bad ass suite JApaid for hundred dollar bills flying at green felt best guy hugs and inside jokes air conditioned cigarette smell awesome entertainer ashtray operation ivy cover filling rooms with dancing smoking a lot and fun iphone broken strip club antics cab driver conversations uncomfortable crushes D flying in from LA M passing to surf instead all you can eat eat like a bird ding ding ding no coke tonight elevators room numbers you want the truth you can't handle the truth falling down squish on fancy couch screens everywhere record deals well deserved hospitality taken advantage of reno dreams crushed balls ready to explode crying crying crying

B cooked N and I dinner in her tahoe cabin the next night. We prefaced the meal with the most hard core game of chess since Ashley's superb endgame play in 1993. B won, but i definitely talked a better talk and, really, that's what matters.

asian hookers, false alarms and sea lions

Monday I met M in the city for some adventuring. I was early and, once again, faced with the horrific choice between listening to the crazy christian college kid with the megaphone trying to save souls OR braving Forever 21 which was our proposed meeting place.

I chose option three which was trying to find a place to grab a drink until she showed up. Quick highlight from the Christian with the megaphone (although I already wrote about these fools):

"Evolutionists want you to believe your great grandfather was a monkey! How crazy is that? It's insane! Doesn't make any sense!"

Yeah. THAT'S crazy. What's up talking snakes.

So i ended up around the corner at this semi shmancy place that claimed to be the real bar where the guy from the Maltese Falcon used to fictionally eat. Sam Spade maybe? Humphrey Bogart played him in the movie. I'd like to entertain with the details, but both film noir and detective novels bore the fuck out me.

M finally showed up and we schlepped it (i'm using that wrong. it was an easy walk, but god i love jewey verbs) to china town so i could buy a kimono for someone and M could take pictures for a movie she's making.

We ended up grabbing some drinks at this brothel/karaoke bar. Fools were sitting on couches being seduced by asian hookers and i got this vibe from the bartender like we were wasting her time because we just wanted to drink and flip through the karaoke catalog which, besides the usual standards, also offered bootleg dvds of current new releases.

I have to admit that, for a second, when M said she was taking me to a brothel i thought maybe our first night on the town together would start with a wicked threesome with an asian call girl. No such luck but, M, if you're reading this... hint hint... Asian hooker threesome.

We grabbed some dinner in north beach. Our waitress was funny AND hella fine (you don't see "hella fine" too much these days. thanks for keeping it in style gabe meline), but she was also, like, the worst waitress ever.

We had to wait forever for our check etc and by the time we got to Pier 39 everything was shutting down. M schmoozed the girls in the arcade into letting us hang out a few extra minutes before they locked up. I got my ass handed to me in some low rent Wipeout rip off, but hey, i was in an arcade with a rad girl so it didn't nag at my ego too much.

What else.. Sea lions... Cute photographs.. BART ride home.

***************************************

Check it out: N, B and K crashed out my house on thursday. B was fucking filthy and showed up on my doorstep smelling every minute of his three week salmon fishing expedition in alaska. K is a dog and also a likely, though less likely, candidate for disease spreading parasites.

N woke up in the morning with some kind of insect bite on her leg. I had a bite on my arm. The general consensus was spider bite.

I had launched a campaign of fear against the spiders last summer (partly out of my own crippling fear - partly out of pride), but it could be they've mustered up some courage and are, once again, on the attack. They have to be stopped because I do, after all, pay the rent and that entitles me to not have the shit scared out me by spiders in the middle of the night.

So anyway N had this bite and the next day she showed it to her dad who's like this brain surgeon or astronaut or something awesome which led to this call:

"Hey"

"Hey so my bite has this big, red circle around it and my dad's a doctor and he's positive it's Lyme's disease and writing out prescriptions for us for antibiotics and i'll be by later to drop it off. You've got to get to a pharmacy as soon as possible blah blah blah scary scary scary"

"Wait isn't that shit caused by tics? What is Lyme's disease? Calm down. My bite doesn't have any rings or anything. It looks mellow"

"No. You HAVE to take care of this. Lyme's disease tics are practically invisible and you need to burn all your belongings and vacuum. Be there soon with your prescription. Bye"

"Wait. Vacuum? Hello?"

So panic right? I leaped at wikipedia. Suddenly my whole body itched. I was freaked out. There are republicans in the white house. Seventy eight percent of american's believe noah's ark is a true story. I don't need this right now.

Which was followed by this call:

"Hey so i talked to my aunt (also a doctor) and she said there's, like, zero percent chance you have Lyme's disease and I probably just have a spider bite and it turns out these tics need to be on you for, like, thirty six hours and are super rare in california (rarer in urban apartments i would think) and it's a big false alarm. Bye"

"Hello? Wait. Hello?"

Again, we never even saw a tic. I vacuumed anyway, but only because there's nothing like a freshly vacuumed studio apartment.

nu uh your smiling they are way to rock to smile DUH lol jk

The eviction party was super crowded and kind of too much to deal with until the police came and told everyone to go home. N and I hid in a back room with some peeps and emerged to find a much more intimate get together. I totally prefer small groups to crowds - plus i was wearing my new red shirt - so the night turned out to be pretty fun.

I bought this red shirt last week that has magical, super powers. When I wear it people are super nice to me. Not that people are dicks to me when I'm not wearing the shirt, but i definitely notice the difference.


I wore the shirt to the eviction party so I ended up meeting a lot of new people and even reuniting with friends I hadn't seen in years. One person I met was this guy, J, who was into asking people this:

"If you could see Kurt Cobain or Jim Morison right now, in their prime, who would you choose?"

The correct answer, and everyone seemed to agree, was Cobain. They were both talentless hacks when it came to lyrics, but at least Cobain's music holds up.

****************************************

After having a few drinks with my Dad at the Albatross I hit the BART and met N in the mission to check out a bunch of short films that her friends and fellow film students had made. The place was a tiny room filled with chairs and had a big projection screen on the wall. There were maybe twenty shorts, a few minutes each, made mostly by budding art students from the local film school. I think I may have been the only person there who was not attached to any of the films being shown.

The ratio of awesome to total shit was about what you would expect. Two or three were pretty decent. One thing that's proving itself over and over again is that if someone doesn't know they suck then they probably also don't know when to stop. Songs, movies, whatever.

I think it's good to keep things short - especially set lists and songs. Just in case I totally suck and don't realize it. Hmmmm I should probably end this blog then - although nobody paid $7 to read this.

I want you

Today was sledge hammering my barricade open and running some errands. I was turning into a shut in and it felt good to walk around telegraph, bumping slow walking fools out of my way, dodging petitions and feeling some much needed sun. Fuck anxiety: I'm buying some new fucking shirts.

I had it pretty together in AA until I was next in line and some fool in front of me was, i don't know, trying to negotiate a hostile takeover of Nabisco with their fucking ATM card or something. What I mean is this: They were taking a really long ass time to purchase their goods. The line was getting long and - props for me for getting out of the house - but the crowd was starting to turn and naturally my ears started buzzing and sweat started pouring. I made it out, obviously, alive.

I only lost my cool once: Dude said "that will be $114" and I did, like, a "REALLY?". I got it together pretty quick though. Sometimes I forget I'm PAYING for the uncomfortable atmosphere.

Around 9pm that thing happened where every song playing on my stereo decided to cater it's lyrics specifically to my situation. Everyone knows once it starts - it's hella on. I'll bend the lyrics to "ice ice baby" so somehow it's a metaphor for whatever sad ass thing I'm feeling if I have to. (NOTE: As I'm writing this "Getting Better" by the fucking Beatles just came on... Touché universe.)

Off to an eviction party near the Ashby BART. I've always thought eviction parties were the best kind of parties. There's always this "steer it into the sun" mood. Endings and new starts etc. My cousin recently went to a divorce party and said they put eviction parties to shame. I could see that. Any fool awesome enough to throw a party in celebration of a failed marriage probably knows what's up when it comes to getting fucked up.